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The Future of Thunderbird

blog.thunderbird.net

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Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#401

Post by rswail »

Been using Thunderbird since I don't remember, before that sylpheed etc.

Use a Mac now and Thunderbird is using 0.1% CPU idle and 562MB.

I use the "folders on the left, message list on the right top, selected message view underneath" view.

Things that I require on Thunderbird (that I had to hack, muck around with):

* Timestamps in ISO8601

* Either the ability to use a Solarized theme, or one that accurately uses the MacOS light/dark themes.

* Larger (16-20pt) font sizes for all panes

* Really good integration between a CardDAV server (I use fastmail) and accumulating email addresses automagically and not get confused with my local MacOS Contacts.

I don't use the tasks/events/calendar integration because it gets confused between my CalDAV server (fastmail), and my local Mac OS calendar.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#402

Post by rswail »

haunter wrote: post #75

I wish Eudora was still around. The source code is available, my secret dream is to work on somtimes in the summer... https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...

Wow, there's a name I haven't seen since I was running a (pre-linux) Windows NT 4 box back in like 1996/7.

I used that until I moved to Linux, and I used sylpheed on top of maildir.

I've used Thunderbird now for years, but I also use fastmail as the mail server and use offlineimap for backing fastmail up locally.

I've got email archives going back to 1998 (which is probably when I moved off Windows NT, come to think of it).

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#403

Post by 6510 »

chefandy wrote: post #397
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

You think Firefox would have more users if they hadn't updated their interface?

I'm still on ff but other browsers became very usable when I lost 100+ extensions.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#404

Post by ratiolat »

formerly_proven wrote: post #5

> “Why does Thunderbird look so old, and why does it take so long to change?” ~ A notable percentage of Thunderbird users Honestly this doesn't seem like the main issue with Thunderbird; the main issue is that the UI is very slow, it tends to use a lot of CPU and memory just sitting there and a lot of operations block the UI. This got a lot worse with 102. 102 unfortunately is so low in responsiveness that it's liter…

I've hit "Thunderbird is slow" many times and it has turned out that the reason is that GMail is applying rate limiting.

I originally switched from Apple mail because I thought Apple mail could not handle my gmail.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/1071518?hl=en

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#405

Post by helmholtz »

carlosjobim wrote: post #154

For a long time I wished for an e-mail client that shows a side-by-side view of the e-mail your composing and the e-mail you're replying to. I think the majority of people would like such a view, yet nobody offers it. Does anybody know any good solution in macOS?

My god, I absolutely agree. On Outlook, you can "Pop Out" the draft of your own email, leaving the original email intact in the background ready for side-by-side view, but that's the only solution I know of.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#406

Post by solatic »

Using Mimestream dramatically realigned my expectations of what a snappy UX feels like. Thunderbird is quite slow by comparison.

I'm not sure that desktop software should attempt to align with casual users. Most casual users will stick to the first-party experience. What is supposed to draw a casual Gmail user away from the first-party webmail? What is supposed to draw a casual Google Calendar user away from the first-party web-calendar? What is going to be not 2x better but 10x better than the first-party interface? The desktop interface needs to put power-users first, or put resource-savings first, or put low-latency UI first. What other advantage can be built on the desktop above the first-party experience, one which is also built by professional designers and Product teams, who will always be a step ahead of you on the feature roadmap?

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#407

Post by sir »

psim1 wrote: post #129

I kind of hate Thunderbird because it is in every way worse than beloved Apple Mail.app, except for one: it can do the Microsoft 365 IMAP Oauth2 dance, but Mail.app can't. Mail.app's native Exchange functionality has broken for me before and caused me to lose mail so I will not trust it. I thought I had the right solution with an IMAP connection to O365 Exchange until they forced that to use Oauth2.

If you use this proxy of mine then any IMAP (or POP/SMTP) client can be used with a “modern” email provider, regardless of whether it supports OAuth 2.0 natively: https://github.com/simonrob/email-oauth2-proxy

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#409

Post by mschuster91 »

throw0101a wrote: post #195
tux3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. Unfortunately, it has some serious performance bugs. It often sits there idle on a brand new laptop eating 50% or 70% of a core. Doing who knows what, without giving any indication or any sort of pause button to the…

> That's also the main problem I have with it. The UI is what it is, but it has the considerable advantage that I'm already used to it. I'm not really clamoring for a different UI, there's bigger problems. If they want to grow the user base (or even maintain it against attrition) then relying on just the current folks isn't enough: you have to get new people to use it. (And hopefully support/donate to it.) Getting ne…

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'.

And that risks doing absolute horseshit. Outlook's new UI for example hides the cc/bcc behind an additional click, extremely annoying for anyone but personal mail usage. How MS still haven't managed to discover and fix that with their billions of corporate users is astonishing.

Re: The Future of Thunderbird

#410

Post by account42 »

emodendroket wrote: post #394
orbital223 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting new blood thus may entail getting rid of the Old School interface and going with whatever is 'current'. Reminds me of the arguments for Firefox getting rid of the "Old School" interface and copying Chrome to bring in new users. Didn't exactly work out very well...

Isn't Thunderbird still using XUL stuff that has been retired from Firefox? It doesn't seem that wise to keep working on that to be honest.

It is if the alternative is breaking all extensions.
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